Frisia Coast Trail.com

Haubargs . Cathedral-like farmsteads with hipped roofs soaring up to twenty meters high, icons of the Eiderstedt peninsula in the region...

On the west bank of the mighty River Rhine, halfway between the cities of Koblenz and Mainz, lies the town of Sankt Goar. Named after...

Let’s go to the omega. To the end of the Frisia Coast Trail . To Ribe in southern Jutland, Denmark. The oldest town in Scandinavia. A town located on the banks of the Ribe Å. A modest river that flows out into the Wadden Sea stoically slow, opposite the islands of Fanø and Mandø. Ribe started as a seasonal marketplace. Year-round settlement began around the year 700. Everything in peaceful times yet. Only with the raid on the island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland in 793 did

If you want to track down who killed the whale, the Frisia Coast Trail  region is the place to start. Stop people on the streets along this southern North Sea littoral and ask whether they know anything, and you will likely hear: “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing.” Politicians and officials—say, in The Hague—will lament that they have no recollection of the affair. Better call them all Ishmael. In this blog post, we set out the unvarnished truth: how the peoples

New York City, the Capital of the World. They call it a lot of things: Gotham, the Big Apple, the Empire City, Modern Gomorrah, even Baghdad-on-the-Subway. And of course, Times Square proudly calls itself the Center of the Universe—although the true center of the world is the village of Aegum. And in the middle of all this noise, lights, and skyscraper swagger, portraits of two quiet men from seventeenth-century Friesland—villagers from Peperga and Koudum—hang proudly in two

The earliest evidence of Frisian merchants—or kāpmon  in the Old Frisian language—engaging in the slave trade dates back to the first half of the seventh century. No less an authority than the Venerable Bede, the Father of English history, recorded this criminal activity. He described a merchant operating in the markets of London who also dealt in slaves. As Fleming (2010) puts it: “Frisian slavers in hopes of swapping luxury goods for a little human flesh.” In this blog post

Is the seaport Maasvlakte the gateway to north-western Europe? No? How about Europoort? Still no? What about the Botlek port area? Or the...

In this blog post, we will argue that the Frisian lands might just as well be called the United Frisian Emirates. Granted, there are a few superficial differences with the modern United Arab Emirates. The Emiratis have camels and goats; the Frisians have cows and sheep. Their climate is hot and dry; the Frisians’ is wet and cold—for now. With global warming, palm trees may soon line the long dykes of the Wadden Sea and turn its barrier islands into Maldivian-style retreats. A

It was not the city of Parisius  ('Paris'). Nor that of Londinium  ('London'). Believe it or not, the early-medieval center for expensive...

On May 5th, 2018, it was exactly two centuries since Karl Marx was born. When the good man published the first volume of Das Kapital  in 1867, he was, in fact, about 1,300 years too late to turn the tide. The ship had already sailed—quite literally. Ships of selfish and ruthless Frisian merchants in pursuit of personal wealth, to be precise. If only Karl had known... the world might have looked—let’s say—a little different today. One might say that the Frisians had much in c

This blog post is about the town of Medemblik—the grande dame  of the Westfriesland region in the province of Noord Holland in the...

On May 28, 2011 Bill Clinton held a speech in Achlum, province Friesland. The village has some 600 inhabitants. Looks like a small audience to me. What was he up to? We searched online for the keywords "Clinton" and "Achlum" and found many articles mentioning large sums of money... Indeed Achlum should be famous for large sums of money. But not for the huge sum that allegedly has been paid for Clinton to speak. So let's pause Bill for a moment. We would like to draw your at